Was 2015 the beginning of the end for SSDs?

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The advent of SSDs has arguably done more to transform the experience of using a computer than any other event in the past eight years. Faster GPUs and CPUs benefit the high-end users that need such horsepower, but solid state disks can breathe new performance into virtually any hardware. The earliest drives may have had performance issues, but once those were ironed out, it was clear that NAND flash’s ascension to the top of the storage market was a question of when, not if, and the “when” depended on questions of reliability and cost-per-bit — not fundamental speed. This fundamental argument has been accepted at every level, from individual PCs to high-end enterprise deployments.

That’s why it’s surprising to see ZDNet instead arguing that 2015 was the “beginning of the end” for NAND flash in the enterprise. This argument hinges on a number of different papers that were published in 2015 concerning NAND reliability, performance, and suitability for datacenter applications. We covered some of these findings when the papers were new, but will summarize the collective findings here:

Facebook and Carnegie-Mellon found that higher temperatures can negatively impact SSD reliability and that this correlates with higher bus power consumption as well. Interestingly, this study found that failure rates did not monotonically increase (only increase) with the amount of data written to NAND flash, that sparse data layouts and dense data layouts can both increase failure rates under certain conditions, and that SSDs that don’t throttle and experience high temperatures have higher failure rates.

A major Korean study on VM performance found that SSD garbage collection didn’t mesh well with existing algorithms for that purpose, leading to significant performance degradations in some cases. The paper concluded that it’s currently impossible to guarantee a set number of IOPS when multiple VMs are hosted on a single drive. While this paper used consumer hardware, the flaws it found in how garbage collection is handled would have applied to enterprise equipment as well.

A new Sandisk study found that the use of multiple layers of log-structured applications “affects sequentiality and increases write pressure to flash devices through randomization of workloads, unaligned segment sizes, and uncoordinated multi-log garbage collection. All of these effects can combine to negate the intended positive affects of using a log.”

When you put these reports together, they point to issues with SSD reliability, performance, and suitability for certain workloads. But I’m much less certain than ZDnet that this stacks up to NAND’s rapid retreat from the data center.

Teething problems vs. cataclysmic deficiencies

I strongly suspect that if we could rewind the clock to the beginning of the HDD era, we’d see similar comments made about the suitability of hard drives to replace tape. In the 1970s and early 1980s, tape was the proven technology and HDDs, particularly HDDs in consumer systems, was the upstart newcomer. It’s difficult to find comparative costs (and it’s highly segment dependent), but the March 4, 1985 issue of Computerworld suggests that tape drives were far cheaper than their HDD equivalents.

The advent of 3D NAND flash has the potential to improve NAND reliability

I don’t want to stretch this analogy too far, but I think there’s a lesson here. The pace of hardware innovation is always faster than the software that follows it; you can’t write software to take advantage of hardware that doesn’t exist yet (at least, not very well). It’s not surprising to see that it’s taken years to suss out some of the nuance of SSD use in the enterprise, and it’s also not surprising to discover that there are distinct best practices that need to be implemented in order for SSDs to perform optimally.

To cite one equivalent example — it was a 2005 paper (backed up by an amusing 2009 video) that demonstrated how shouting at hard drives could literally make them stop working. While drive OEMs were obviously aware of the need to dampen vibrations in enterprise deployments long before then, the issue bubbled up to consumer awareness in that timeframe.

Hard drives, nevertheless, continue to be sold in large numbers — even in enterprise deployments.

None of this is to suggest that NAND flash is foolproof or does not need a medium-to-long-term replacement. I’ve covered several such potential replacements just this year. It does, however, suggest that a bit more perspective is in order. It’s easy to promise huge gains on paper and extremely difficult to deliver those gains in a scaleable, cost-effective manner.

Right now, it looks as though 3D NAND adoption will drive the further evolution of SSD technology for the next 3-5 years. That, in turn, will make it more difficult for alternative technologies to find footing — a replacement storage solution will need to match the improving density of 3D NAND, or offer multiple orders of magnitude better performance in order to disrupt the NAND industry. Intel’s joint Micron venture and its 3D XPoint could disrupt the status quo when it arrives next year, but I’ll wait for benchmarks and hard data before concluding that it will.

Far from being the beginning of the end, I suspect 2015 was the end of the beginning of NAND flash, and will mark a shift towards software-level optimization and a better understanding of best practices as the technology moves deeper into data centers.

Tagged In

“Hard drives, nevertheless, continue to be sold in large numbers — even in enterprise deployments.”

Well ya. There is no large and cheaper storage medium currently. If we could get 8TB SSDs the same price, perhaps that wouldn’t be a concern as much, but also the speed isn’t ‘as’ important on these enterprise drives either. No surprise magnetic media is still widely in use for cost and storage reasons.

lord cheeseburger

“but also the speed isn’t ‘as’ important on these enterprise drives either”

Depends on the environment. Nimble, Pur, SolidFire, etc have no problem selling AFA. It’s a huge and growing market. And will continue to grow as the price of flash drops. Also as we see some big performance improvements, ie SATA Express, NVMe and the removal of the FTL.

BillBasham

I’m glad you brought a good sense of perspective to the article. I was there at the beginning of corporate hard drive use, and a hard drive failure was always a possibility at any time. Things are so much better now.

Kyle

Nice article.

I’m ‘still’ using the first SSD I ever purchased as the main OS drive of my desktop. The abuse I put that through speaks volumes (no pun intended) on the reliability of that particular drive, or my good fortune. Then again, I’ve never had an HDD fail on me either, but I always keep those under 50% filled for performance purposes.

Kary

Good points. I’d only add that it’s probably been over 15 years since I had a hard drive fail, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t replaced a drive that started making noise before it possibly failed. I’m not sure how full a drive is would affect a HDD failing due to mechanical reasons.

BTW, still using my first SSD too–I think it’s about 3 years old now.

Mayoo

I still rock an Intel 510 and an Intel 520 from when they were both new. Never had a problem. The only reason I bought a 520 is because I needed more space and didn’t wanted to go back to HDDs.

Kyle

I know keeping the used space as low as possible increases speeds, but I’ve also heard (I haven’t confirmed) that keeping a drive full tends to cause them to fail more frequently then keeping a drive partially empty.

As we learned from Blackblaze , the HDD capacity and specific model also has a very large impact on drive failure rates, so it might simply be that people use certain drives for bulk storage more than others, which could lead to this sort of rumor emerging.

lord cheeseburger

> that keeping a drive full tends to cause them to fail more frequently then keeping a drive partially empty

This would be true in theory due to the way wear leveling algorithms work.

Jason Slover

Mechanical reasons would be your drives spinning faster to access the full drive as well as arm being extended further. Thats not to say it would cause damage but the potential is there.

Jason Slover

With that being said SSD for a regular user is a huge step in performance. Can’t speak on reliablitly I have only had my SSD in use for maybe 6 months but benchmarked machine is hell of a lot faster with SSD then HDD however HDD is more affordable for much more realistate but if you don’t need the space running an OS of a SSD is incredibly faster

Maverick Guy

What’s the model of that SSD?

Mike kizaberg

Why do you lot write titles like this just to get clicks =/, you said this about hdds and they’re still around and are not going anywhere, now you’re saying the same thing about ssds, you lot should be ashamed of yourself.

Ekard

Please read the articles before posting on them. If you had read this article you would of known that Joel does not agree with Robin Harris (the author of the article that Joel is posting this article in response to) and stated he believes that SSDs are primed for software improvements (vs hardware improvements).

Though I believe the use of the term “SSD” is a bit overreaching in this case. The title should of used NAND instead.

Title: “Was 2015 the beginning of the end for SSDs?”
Ending a title with a question mark suggests that the answer = yes.

Example:
“Was Obama caught naked on the White House lawn?”

If the article is about the answer being no, then the title was clickbait designed to lure you in with the suggestion that the answer was yes. It’s shameless and people are right to call it out when they see it.

Ekard

I didn’t dispute it was clickbait and titles that are questions are normally answered as a no. This is not a new practice (started before the internet, in printed media). It is a well known and documented way to grab the readers attention (again pre-internet). Again did not dispute his labeling of the article title as clickbait.

Joel Hruska

I do. Thoroughly. I took the central assertion of the ZD headline and *questioned* it. And explained my reasoning for doing so.

There are two ways to tackle this kind of situation, where Author B is writing in response to Author A.

You can use a question mark, as I did, or you can use a strong declaration. So I could have written “No, this isn’t the beginning of the end for enterprise SSDs” or “No, enterprise SSDs aren’t being phased out.”

The reason I dislike this construction has nothing to do with clickbait. I dislike it because it drops readers in the middle of a discussion they didn’t know we were having. It’s confusing. A logical thing for a reader to do would be to ask: “Did he (or someone else at ET) recently write a story on why enterprise SSDs are being phased out?”

By rephrasing a direct statement made by the ZD author as a question, I make it clear that I am *literally* questioning his conclusion. And while this tendency is absolutely abused in other contexts “Is Obama a Muslim?” “Is the GOP racist?” “Will Mars be as close to Earth as the Moon next week?” that’s not the purpose here.

Joel Hruska

The construction methodology you refer to is used to plant doubt in the minds of the reader.

In this case, I use a question mark to signify that I am going to *engage with a topic.* I clearly identify the author of the original piece. I discuss his conclusions and my own.

In this case, because I’m engaging with a piece written by someone else, the “?” Is neither an attempt to oversell a weak conclusion nor an attempt to mislead a reader. I am questioning a statement made in headline by someone else.

Mayoo

“Facebook and Carnegie-Mellon found that higher temperatures can negatively impactSSD reliability”

SSD don’t heat … At least noting close to “high temperatures”.

Joel Hruska

Read the report. SSDs are not the only things in data centers that generate heat, and operating temperatures can exceed 40C.

Ah! If that’s the case, though, I might consider that a failure of sorts. Had single-threaded scaling continued its old course, we probably wouldn’t have needed dual cores.

Joel Hruska

I don’t think that’s true. Plenty of people loved having dual-cores — hell, I loved having dual-cores — precisely because many of us did basic tasks that could benefit.

The great advantage of Hyper-Threading on the P4, even when it *didn’t* give the chip a performance advantage over AMD’s K8, was that it made the entire system feel smoother. The ability to keep executing one thread and have another available for GUI updates or simple application launches made the entire system “creamy smooth” to quote Scott Wasson of TR.

I still remember testing a quad-core / dual-socket AMD Opteron rig with dual graphics cards. They slapped down two Nvidia chipsets on a Tyan motherboard and did the whole thing that way. Fun times.

Sheldon Cooper

Shit, I like having dual cores.

Ekard

How can it be the beginning of the end if we do not have a replacement technology available for consumers? I understand Joel is not agreeing with ZDNet but I am suspect of any story that doesn’t show the replacement for whatever is supposedly going away. Yes the original article list some technologies that “could” replace NAND but none of them are on the market. Also, why SSD? Shouldn’t the articles be about NAND and not SSD’s? There is nothing stopping companies like Intel and Micron from selling SSDs based on Xpoint rather than NAND (the whole reason NVME was created to not be based upon a technology).

Joel Hruska

Ekard,

In theory, you can replace enterprise with a tech capable of doing the job in that area, before waterfalling it to consumers. In practice, things tend to roll out simultaneously.

Ekard

My statement still stands, nothing is poised to take the place of NAND in datacenters. If performance is not the primary metric for you wouldn’t be using a NAND based storage solution in the enterprise space anyways. NAND and HDD are you main storage systems (outside archival), the former being performance and the latter being priceGB. As far as I know (which is not much when it comes to enterprise storage) nothing else is available on the market yet, even for enterprise, to replace performance solutions that are leveraging NAND.

Basically, if there is not a technology available on the market now that can fill the performance role that NAND fills, NAND based SSDs are not going anywhere anytime soon. NAND solutions fill a niche very well, more performance than HDDs and cheaper than RAM per GB.

jdwii

Couldn’t they just cool the SSD’s?

PtolemyWasWrong

Basically, SSDs suffer from TMH – Too Much Housekeeping to be useful AND reliable long term, or for typical workloads. Get them close to byte-level addressing, and things should improve markedly.

lord cheeseburger

This is demonstrably false.

High End – All flash arrays from several vendors (Nimble, Pur, etc) and every major SAN manufacturer includes flash (Hitachi, 3Par, HP, EMC, NetApp).

Low End – Every manufacturer sells SSDs in every computer variant, from desktops to high end workstations and every size and shape of laptop.

Consumer level drives have warranties lasting 5-10 years. There is absolutely no basis for the claim that they’re “unreliable long term” for “typical workloads” – whatever that means, typical where, for whom? In the datacenter? On the desktop? What are you talking about? Doesn’t matter, you’re wrong.

PtolemyWasWrong

1) Until recently, many SSDs experienced a huge decline in speed once all addressable clusters were written to once. This is crap.
2) Try pulling the power from a machine with an SSD, and see if the SSD dies. If you’re afraid to do that, they are crap.
3) Folks using SSDs to record months worth of high-frame video capture can tell you about their frustrations.
Basically, SSDs are like a new relationship – after 10 weeks of intense usage, you’re ready to buy a new one to get the speed you had at the beginning.

Jeremy Morales

I don’t own a SSD on my personal computer. The GB/$ isn’t quite there for me yet. Work computer has one though and I do enjoy it.

Basically, flash memory technology is unreliable and can fail in a multitude of different ways.

Creating reliability from unreliable components is not easy.

Crashbanksbuysilver .

I have zero problems with mine..

Reginald Peebottom

Not exactly on point but I’m curious if other readers have used whole disc encryption on SSDs like Veracrypt or the late Truecrypt? I have but it seemed to kill performance far more noticeably than it ever did on mechanical HDs – or that was my seat of the pants impression.

Has anyone else noticed that and if so is there an explanation as to why?

Joel Hruska

I have not tested it myself. Linux or Windows? Was any other form of encryption also enabled? (Bootlocker, for example).

Mangap

I hope 3D Xpoint memory will be released soon to market

benmyers

Back when SSDs were awfully expensive, I outfitted a pair of new Thinkpad T410s with the largest-at-the-time 512GB SSDs. Those Thinkpads, at the hands of the owners of a software company, are still going strong after 4 years, and they have come back to me for more SSD-equipped laptops for each of their employees. I have similarly equipped old Thinkpad X200s with smaller SSDs, creating better-than-Chromebook ultra-fast long-on-battery-life small laptops. SSDs rock!

WTF

From personal experience I wont be using them again as I’ve had 2 out of 3 SSD’s trashed for inexplicable reasons although one was turned into a brick by a Windows 10 upgrade. I don’t find them significantly faster than a normal HDD and their reliability sucks and cost per gigabyte is still too much..

DrWattsOn

@WTF: a suggestion.

I’ve done this and it NEVER has failed, tho had to use old-BIOS machines and wait like for-e v e r! USE SPINRITE. I have used it on SSDs at LEVEL2 (only once higher), though if it (the ssd) is done it’s done, so then do level4, which I had to do once, and they somehow mystically (I say, because I don’t get how) … they repair themselves.

I have maintained a Kingston 64GB system drive for since I bought it. It took a powerline spike, could not boot, ran Spinrite at level 4, it worked, and run at level 2 every 6 months or so. No further problems. So, Scoffers, do without.
I have suggested to everyone I know that had SSD failure (including at Enterprise level) and ALWAYS= SUCCESS.
So, if someone does this and it doesn’t work? Well, if
your car drives off the bridge because it got a flat, when you pull it out and fix the flat of course the car is NFG. SO WHAT? If you had maintained the tires, then … And, EVERY ANOLOGY FAILS; a perfect approximation is the thing itself.
Now upgraded to a Sam 850Pro 512GB. And backing up to HDD. “Spinning Rust”. Well, EVERY HDD I have used has had a fan bolted to its bottom, and none has failed. That’s about 10 of ’em still in use for over 10 years. Tho I knew to SpinRite ’em regularly, so cooling or SpinRite or both, they all work, though kinda small by today’s standards (80-320GB).

Jhollman

Im both a home user (Gamer) and a IT user, i can say i wont be buying an SSD in the near future because if the SSD’s performace degrades exponentially with the amount of data loaded then it is useless, HDs do not do that, so when i have to choose between buying an overpriced SSD which wont last me much or a safe and bullet-proof HD, yeah! i choose the HD. I still think SSDs have a future, if and only if they can fix all their problems.

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